In a bustling hallway on the sixth floor of a downtown courthouse, Alcira Ayala sat on a bench with her husband and daughter, anxiously waiting for her eviction case to be called. She held a black cloth bag filled with neatly organized records that she hoped would help her win her case and stay in the apartment that she and her family have lived in for nearly two decades.

Since learning this summer that her landlord wanted to evict them, Ayala had spent days calling and showing up at the offices of local nonprofit groups to ask for help.

She had hoped to get a free lawyer, but quickly learned that there aren’t enough in the city to represent everyone who needs help. To try to defend herself, she went to the L.A. Law Library to ask for guidance filing the legally required response to the notice. Then, she attended hours of online training hosted by the nonprofit Eviction Defense Network, which teaches tenants without lawyers how to prepare for court.

Dozens of people gathered at the Antioch-Pittsburg Amtrak station Saturday to protest its planned closure.

"The train is a big deal for me and my family. We like to take the train just to go up to Sacramento, sometimes to Fresno," said Antioch resident Monique McCoy, who read a poem at the rally on Saturday. "The message is just, put yourself in our shoes. If you couldn't get to work and take the train to work, maybe to Sacramento or the surrounding area, how would that affect you and your family?"

Many people at the rally Sunday live in Antioch, but some attendees took the train to Antioch from Richmond and Oakland to attend. After the rally, they all joined in on a walking tour of nearby destinations around Antioch. Residents toured the El Campanil Theater and the Royal Banquet and Event Hall.

Attendees told NBC Bay Area they use the train to go to work, to get to doctor appointments, and even to see their family members.

"The train has been very, very strategically important, especially since I've had an injury, and I can't sit too long in the car, so on the train, you can get up, walk around, get something to eat," said Contra Costa County resident Eddie Gums who often rides the train to attend public meetings.

ANTIOCH, California — Excessive evictions will soon be a thing of the past in Antioch with the passage of stronger tenant protections aimed to not be overly burdensome on landlords.

The Antioch City Council passed the just cause ordinance in a 5-0 vote on Tuesday. It is expected to be officially ratified in September and the new rules would go into effect 30 days later.

The ordinance outlines protections for tenants evicted due to substantial repair or renovation works. This means that tenants who have been evicted in order for their landlord to repair or renovate a unit can return to the unit at a rate similar to what they paid prior to their eviction . . .

Several residents who spoke before the council Tuesday had hoped the council would widen the protections and prevent families from being evicted when school is in session. Middle-schooler Jadon Pierre King said children should never experience homelessness and asked the council to prohibit the evictions during the school year.

“I have been homeless before, and I was scared,” he said. “If we are worried about leaving our home, then we can’t focus on school. If we are homeless, we won’t have a safe place to sleep, eat, relax or do our homework. If we get evicted, we lose our support system and friends.”

LOS ANGELES, California - A coalition of housing and tenants rights advocates held a rally and bus tour to call attention to rising rent in the San Fernando Valley and beyond, and the need for a new rent cap for rent stabilized buildings across the city of Los Angeles.

The Keep LA Housed-FIX LA Reality Rally and Bus Tour on Aug. 22 began outside Van Nuys City Hall. The bus tour made stops outside apartment buildings in North Hills and Canoga Park, where rents are slated to be raised and some tenants are facing the possibility of ending up homeless because they won’t be able to pay the higher rates.

Jenny Colon, who has lived in the same North Hills apartment for nearly three decades, said her current rent will likely be doubled in the near future. If that happens, she would be forced to move out and try to find a new apartment she can afford, which she described as increasingly rare.

“He’s yelled at me [and] has had me followed. … He also left me without access to a working toilet for several days [and] when my apartment got flooded, he neglected that as well,” Colon told the San Fernando Valley Sun/el Sol. “There’s a lot of people that have dealt with [similar harassment] and have already been unjustly thrown out onto the streets, and we’re talking about very, very vulnerable communities.” 

Over the last year, tenants have brought lawsuits against a group of real estate developers and property management firms — including several in the Bay Area — alleging that they colluded to push up rents by sharing information using a pricing software made by Texas-based company RealPage.

Now, the Department of Justice is getting involved. On Friday, the Biden administration, alongside the attorneys general of California and seven other states, filed an antitrust lawsuit against RealPage, accusing the company of reducing competition among landlords and taking over the market for such algorithm-based rental software. It’s one of the first major antitrust suits to take aim at a company in the rental housing industry.

“Americans should not have to pay more in rent because a company has found a new way to scheme with landlords to break the law,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- A coalition of housing advocacy groups on Thursday held a rally and bus tour to speak out against rising rents in the San Fernando Valley and citywide.

"No one wants to live in the street. No one wants to live in the thin line between 'I might have a home today and I don't have a home tomorrow,'" Jenny Colon, a member of the nonprofit Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, said at the rally in Van Nuys. She said her rent is due to triple where she lives, an increase that she simply cannot afford.

Colon and other housing advocates visited apartment complexes in the San Fernando Valley where rents are being raised, forcing some tenants to face eviction and possible homelessness due to lack of affordability.

"This just can't stand in Los Angeles. This is not who we are. We need something different," said Rae Huang, who advocates for the homeless at the state level.

LOS ANGELES - In the three years since Los Angeles banned landlords from harassing tenants and made violating the rules a criminal offense, more than 13,000 complaints alleging harassment have been filed with the housing department. About two dozen of those cases were referred by the department to the city attorney’s office. So far, four fines are pending and no cases have been criminally prosecuted.

When it was approved in 2021, Los Angeles’ Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance was touted as a breakthrough for renters’ rights. At a time of rapidly rising housing costs, the rules were meant to protect tenants from being threatened or intimidated by landlords — a tactic advocates say is sometimes used to push people out of rent-controlled homes.

But tenant advocates say harassment has continued largely unchecked in the three years since the law passed, with tenants regularly reporting that their landlords resort to intimidation, illegal eviction notices, threats, lockouts and other actions meant to make their living situations difficult to bear. The thousands of complaints and lack of prosecutions since 2021 are further evidence that the law is weak and needs to be strengthened, advocates say.

At the end of this year’s legislative session, nearly a quarter of the 120 lawmakers will depart and collect their final state paycheck in late December.

Some hope to start in a new elected office next year, while others will return to their previous jobs. But based on recent history, at least one in five will land a job at companies or organizations trying to influence California’s government.

And as CalMatters Digital Democracy reporter Ryan Sabalow explains, it’s possible that some are job hunting while still voting on bills that could affect their prospective new bosses.

• Outgoing Republican Assemblymember Devon Mathis of Visilia: “August is kind of … the interview period. You see people that are trying to shop, you know, for a third-house gig or something like that.”

While legislators are still in office, state ethics guidelines allow voting on bills that could benefit a “significant segment” of an industry as long as it doesn’t deal specifically with their would-be employer. Mathis has started a public relations firm and agreed to work for an energy company, but said he checked with state ethics officials to make sure he wasn’t violating any laws.